Trying to Solve the Humanities with an AI Startup
Last summer, I co-founded an AI startup.
The premise was straightforward: if large language models can model and generate natural language, summarize high-dimensional inputs, and produce context-aware responses, then they should be able to take on portions of humanities work: writing, analysis, and attention-intensive interpretive tasks.
I spent the summer building, running user interviews, and watching how people actually interacted with the system.
Met with Jared! (Left)
The pattern that emerged was strange. The system scaled easily in the places that didn’t matter, and consistently broke in the places that did.